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This article notes that the largely erotic poetry written by canonical Latin elegists are ‘ironic, darkly comic, and politically self-conscious’. It specifically argues that ancient Latin elegy could be self-reflexive, to the point that its very ground of reflection can be located in its own narration of experience. Then, it informs that the complexities of Latin elegy do not make much of the ‘mourning, self-pity, and long good byes that would characterize its modern form’. The characteristic of Latin elegy concentrates on the erotic, the motif of the lover as the soldier, first person subjective narration, a combination of irony, preciosity, and a learned allusive style. The elegiac collection allows for the elaboration of a distinct subject position that is not only unprecedented in Hellenistic elegy but also unique to this period and genre of Latin literature. An examination of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid is finally provided.

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Critical Reader (2002), Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (2004), Latin Verse Satire: An Anthology and Critical Reader (2005), and Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Plato and the Construction of the Subjectin Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (2007).

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